I loved A Star Is Born and all of the awesome music that accompanied the film.
And, of course, it only makes sense that there was some major country music star power behind a lot of it. People like Jason Isbell, Lori McKenna and Lukas Nelson had a big part in writing and playing a large portion of the songs you hear in the movie.
Arguably the most popular song from the movie, “Shallow”, is a knockout out ballad performed by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. But, the music was actually played by Lukas’ band Promise of the Real, which also plays the backing band to main character Jackson Maine aka Bradley Cooper in the actual film, too.
Lukas recently took to twitter to talk about their involvement in the process of creating the music. He said when they got there to start working on it, this particular song had already been written and was basically finished:
“The song had been written already by Stephanie [Lady Gaga], Andrew Wyatt, Anthony Rossomando and Mark Ronson. The music and lyrics were already there. But, we had already gotten a pretty great production team going and my band ‘Promise of the Real’ was doing great in the studio.
Everybody was getting along and I think Stephanie was having a good time guiding the band, too, and so was Bradley in how they wanted the band to look and sound and feel in the film and vice versa.”
But, according to Gaga, there was one thing missing:
“We were all helping each other it was a really nice collaborative experience. And so she said, ‘You know what, we’ve gotta have an intro to this song’. And I had been listening to a lot of Eric Clapton, and so I had this [intro] in mind.
And I said ‘Well what about this?’. And she loved it, and the band did too. And so we ended up tracking the song right then and there that ended up in the film, that version.”
It was so good, in fact, that it essentially stayed the same for the entirety of production.
“It wasn’t changed much, just a little bit of drum rearrangements for the album version, but basically that same thing. Proud of the band for being on that track that’s out there in the world, and I think Bradley and Gaga did a fantastic job.”
Watch him play a bit of the opening intro and that distinctive riff here:
And you have to see him perform the song with his band and LA artist Hunter Elizabeth back in 2019 at The Troubador in West Los Angeles…
And of course, the original:
